Mine Eyes
by LuteLyre
Summary: Some things change, others stay the same. Naruto will always be the same. Even when he's bleeding in her arms.


A/N: So, I bring out the drama here immensely. Maybe too immensely. But it was very fun to write, and Naruto gets to be amazing and bold and oh so lovely. Awe. I cried a bit, but that's because I'm soppy and weepy and girly. Sigh.

Warnings! PG-13 for language, heavy make-out and character death.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Damn.

Pairing: Naruto/Sakura

Some thing's change, others always stay the same. Naruto will always be the same. Even when he's bleeding in her arms.

Eyes

_When I look in your eyes,_

_And I feel your soul, _

_All there for me,_

_I die a little._

Naruto cranes his neck up from the restraining hand pressed on his throat. His breath is gasping and choking and his eyes see red. He feels her nails dig into his flesh with hopeless strength as they struggle to hold him down and strangely the bite of the keratin stings him noticeably.

He looks up, a growl on his mouth, to glimpse past his rage and see delicate strands of pink hair floating in front of his nose and a bruised and scratched face that dripped with red and slime and… tears?

He shook off that disorienting thought. No, not tears. Never tears anymore. Why would she cry? They had a job to do was all.

He focused on her shadowed face, saw the two eyes, and was jolted by the fact that he could hardly recognize them.

–though, the tiny, isolated and smart part of his still functioning mind acknowledged that this could by incongruity due to his current state of dementia, but he wasn't really listening.

When did he ever listen?

The eyes were the same shape as hers, the same largeness and wide setness below her lamented forehead which he never thought of as ugly at all, the same candy lashes stuck together by grit, but the color was off. They were swirling and chaotic and so darkened with emotion and deepened with pain that there was hardly any color in them at all, let alone forest, emerald green. Where was the pale transparency of fresh cut green celery and glass he knew?

His vision blurred with red again, cutting across his sight in broad bold spikes and then he was foaming and raging and snarling and struggling to get up from being under her, her hands in a vise-like grip, one on his neck where the nails had dug, the other pressed at his chest. She was pushing him down, _holding_ him. He couldn't stop to wonder how come she was managing this without too much fuss when she could never contain him before, he couldn't stop to ask how come her arm on his chest was so _red_, redder then the crimson wave in his eyes and brain, a rusty darkish red that clung and clumped and covered her arm and _dripped_… like…

He couldn't stop to puzzle these things because he was _hurting._ Hurt like an ache after a vicious punch to the gut that wasn't going away, like getting the breath knocked out of him and forced gale-like inside him at once. Repeatedly.

There was electricity in his mouth and buzzing in his head and a chakra residue burnout in his limbs like a thousand ants thundering under his skin.

–Aburame would get a kick out of that one, eh? He mused in the corner of his mind blindly clutching onto rational thought.

He struggled and thrashed anyway, despite the hurt, but she wouldn't let go. Couldn't she see? He had _things_ to attend to! He had no business lying there uselessly. The enemy wasn't going to kill himself was he? He glared at her, a true glare, and he didn't know that his eyes were switching from red to gold to blue and back again so fast that she couldn't blink those strange dark eyes of her own to catch it.

Something like a keen broke from her lips and hit his ears and it almost stilled him, because he didn't think he'd ever heard that sound before, like shattering hearts.

"No Naruto." She said.

Her face was by his ear and he knew she was shouting it over the rumbling of his still-coming growls and snarls, but it felt like she'd murmured the words, a whisper in his ear, from the broken way she told him, the steady-but-shaking tone, like she'd practiced saying this in her head but still was only barely managing it.

He could still smell her, he noticed, and wondrously he marveled at it wreathing so close to him, a sweet cherry-sweaty scent he could taste in his nose.

"You're not going to get –get up."

Steady-but-shaking, like she was holding onto her sanity with fraying threads.

Was that…tears again?

"Why not! We hav- have, w-work to do!" he jerks uncomprehendingly.

There is another little keen in his ear and her hands contract on his skin and he convulses spasmodically as it hurts. He notices again her eyes, dark depths and tortured sadness. He notices again the red soaking her arm and running over her wrist and down under her nails and sliding and moving and it _smelled… _like—

"Because you're never getting up Naruto. You're dy— you're dying, and I _can't stop it._"

And her voice grits out the words as though she doesn't believe them herself. Naruto can barely think about it, can hardly think at all, but his body stiffens as her nails clench and his crazed dying heart jumps.

"Ky-Kyuubi…will…"

"No."

She groans and her nose is in his hair. He finds himself vaguely wondering if she can smell him, his soap. Then the words come fast, a rush.

"No, he can't do anything Naruto-kun, and I can't do anything. It's too fast, too much blood loss and I cant stop it, and were all to drained and you're dying, you're dying now, so much _blood _and Nar-Naru—"

Her heart is tight and her throat is constricted and she is so suffocated that her last words are choked and lost to the disgustingly blue sky above them for the ninja under her palms who realized her hand on his chest was trying futilely to staunch the blood and that the red covering her and everything and dripping is _blood_. His blood. Pooling around him and around her and getting absolutely fucking everywhere.

She's right.

He locks eyes with her and then his rage is ignited with despair and hopelessness, growling and swearing, but his rage is a comet and he can feel it, electric inside him and he gives a feral bloody grin. If it doesn't reach all the way into his eyes, it will soon enough and it doesn't matter anyway.

"Sakura-Chan,"

His voice is raspy and he bucks beneath her, all buzz and life, like a runner waiting at the start line of a very, very short race. She slowly looks at him.

"Let me up. I me-meant it. I've got _shit to do._"

Her eyes are so full of raw darkness that he boils it over and he's up as though its easy and not hurting and he's racing on his feet toward their only half-wounded enemy with energy and intensity sparking from his skin and electricity cackling from his eyes and the same bloodied wild, flashing fanged smile on his face and manic in his gaze.

Because if he was going to go out, which he apparently was because he would never doubt Sakura, then hell if he'd go like a guttering candle by a baby's cradle. He'd be an explosion on the skies, a nuclear illumination. No one would forget.

It hurt too much to think of this any other way.

She could only watch, unconsciously moving with him and working sinuously in background to his unrestrained cannon of intent, barely needing to throw a kunai. She felt weak, weak from them and him and all the pain and this stupid twisted trick that _couldn't_ be happening, because he _couldn't_ be dying. No. The maniacal lilt to his mind and the roughness of his breath was not real.

But she knew it wasn't a trick. Because the sheets of blood flying from him and hitting her were _real_, sticking to her face and gasping from his lips and the chakra steaming from his skin like a ventwas _real_, sizzling fire through the air as he let it all out.

Her eyes were full and she couldn't close them.

Then she was growing and burning with him, because a lit up Naruto inspired the same in everyone else and she wanted to kill, to tear something up and grind it into the ground and make it take this back, because this wasn't fair.

The wildfire was hard to contain, and she glowed as he laughed loud and baying when the final explosion rocked the air and world around them. It made her eardrums spin in circles and she united with him in a hoarse battle cry yelled from her strangled windpipe.

Inside she was breaking and broken as she screamed though, because this was the end. That crazy knifes-edge, hair-raising laugh was the last one she'd ever hear. Her eyes were so black she could hardly see, but she kept straining them, searching for any glimpse of orange and red and shocking blonde she could find, because this was the last time she could think fondly of his poor wardrobe choice and this was the last time she could feel fear from his body's violent tenant, this was the last time she would see his hair glint in the sun like a diamonds glitter.

And then the stupid, stupid enemy was dead and the explosion had finished shaking the air and darkening the sky to an appropriate smoldering ash gray, because how dare anyone be cheerful about this, especially the blue sky. Infuriatingly blue, annoyingly blue, blue like his…like Naruto's…

She crawled through the crater he'd impacted, and when she saw his form she expected him to be still, with maybe a smattering last stand of defiance in staring eyes, and she dreaded it so much, and moved slow.

But he wasn't still, he was there and coughing and choking and his hita-ae was clutched in his hand, beaten and gray, and there was so much blood everywhere, even more then before. It was Naruto's, and it belonged to him.

It was his. It should be inside him. It _had been_ inside him.

She gags.

His fingers twitched toward her as he spasms and splashed in the pool of rust red, and then she was over him in a blink of an eye, stilling him with her hands pressing the blood, the gore, going through medical motions she knew would do absolutely nothing and not caring, muttering a string of words under her breath to him. Rambling, babbling blindly, even as he growled strings of desperate curses through his teeth.

She didn't know if her whispers helped or hurt. Her full eyes were dripping salt and blood and sweat onto his face as she murmured into him, feeling his life twitching and fluttering underneath her hands, fighting to the end.

He chuckled and his eyes as they snapped and focused and dilated were a strange mix of blue edges, gold irises and red pupils while he stared.

"S-Sakura-Chan, are you crying for me?" a flash of a grin in his gruff voice.

Her nose scrunched. It wasn't right that this was happening. She shook and dug her hands deeper into him, so deep, she didn't know how deep into him she was, how much she was inside, she only knew if she could dig deep enough and hold on, hold him together, maybe she could keep him longer.

"I…don't kn-know" If she didn't admit to it, maybe none of it was true.

She had been. For him, he knew. He laughed at the absurdity of that. He was cold and on fire at the same time and he could feel himself slipping.

But he couldn't go could he? Not yet, no.

No. She was there, crying for him and her smell still hung in his nose, faintly underneath the tang of all this stupid fluid from his veins, and her hair tickled his face like silk against his numbly charged body. Her new eyes, with barely a hint of green and so dark and deep that he was drowning in their mesmerizing gray agony were on his face.

They were lovely, he decided. She, covered in his blood and muck and sorrow and grit and ugliness, was beautiful.

"Your eyes are beautiful Sakura-Ch-chan. Like…" He sighed. "A whirlpool."

She heard his words and was stock still and shaking at the same time. Shell-shocked and ever-soothing rolled into one. Her eyes bored back into his as he looked and she brushed off his words and tried to shush him.

"No, no Naruto, don't speak, don't talk, shh-shh, please, no don't, please stay, oh—"

_Live a little longer, longer, live a little bit longer, don't die, don't leave, please, stay, stay, stay, don't go, don't die, please stay with me__**!**_

The words screamed themselves unthinkingly in her head, in her chest.

"Uggrh" He groaned and there was a hint of a snarl in his voice. "**No.** I told you."

He pushed himself, an inch at a time, up on his elbows as she watched, scandalized.

"I've got another thing to _do_ Sakura."

She only had time to realize he'd left out the '-Chan' ending before he'd crashed his lips up against her own, hard and bruising and heart-wrenching. They were sealed together at the mouth and he was _kissing _her. Gods, he was kissing _her._

She was too rooted to the spot to automatically move away and disregard and push him down, make him live longer, his breath pump in and out more, to force his sluggish heart to beat faster, and work, work to make him lifelike, because he was _there,_ right there against her lips, his breath forcing itself into her mouth from his, and teeth sharply snapping, and _living_. He tasted of blood. Blood and sweat, and despair and salty, grimy tears, hers or his she couldn't say, and his tongue shoved itself on hers and his teeth and elongated fangs were biting her lips, drawing blood, but underneath the sick death in his mouth was Naruto.

She could taste him, foxy and devilish and naughty and _alive_.

She moaned and her blood-soaked hands fisted in his blood-soaked hair and their tongues twisted as they bit each other. She ached to just swallow him within in her, take him in, and he forced his being ruthlessly inside her while they cried. He poured himself into her in their kiss, she felt it. He poured all of him, leaving nothing hidden. He wanted to make her understand.

He poured his hatred and bitterness for this and for his lot in life, his speed and his spirit, effervescent and perpetual. His self, his charismatic loudmouth devilry, his truth and his power and then his passion, his lust, stomach-flopping and mind-fucking, and **hot** and **good**. He shoved in his pain and his doubt and his heart-pulling self confidence, and his rage, violent and rip-roaring and wrathful manifest of his Kyuubi inmate. He forced his gut-wrenching and overwhelming and crazy, perfect, stupid zeal and **love** and his whole spirited orange and yellow and bright and shining _self_ into her. Into their joined mouths and bloodied bodies.

She screamed brokenly inside as all of it came, a wave, all of _this_. She took it and she _wanted_ it and held him as close and tight as she possibly could because he was Naruto. Uzumaki Naruto, unending. Naruto, Naruto. And he. Could. Not. Die.

He poured his soul into her as it left him. She felt his soul physically leave him and pass her lips. As he slowly sagged down, her teeth and hands holding him to her until the last possible second, he fell back into the red lake and he was _smiling,_ the _bastard._

He was… Naruto was…

She knew what he was, but she was leaning down to press her red swollen lips pleadingly to his smiling ones and feeling no response to the willing caress before she could accept it.

He was _**dead.**_ Dead, dead, dead. Dead like the man he had just killed. Dead like Asuma. Dead like things that maggots crawled over. Dead like things that got put in _graves._ Dead like nothing.

Nothing but a tomb and a blood-encrusted hita-tae and a name carved in cold stone on a granite centograph. _Dead._

She mashed her bloody mouth on his angrily and tugged her hands in his soaking hair and the raw yell that ripped from her throat held more disbelief then grief in it because this was impossible. How dare he _smile_. How dare he_ close his eyes._

She slumped over him, the fox ninja, who was more of a redhead now then a sunny yellow blonde. Whose skin was cooling too fast. Whose mouth she covered with her own torn lips, breathing against the reddened fangs there.

She thought of the kiss where she'd felt his body strong and his breath fiery and his passion roaring and his heart beating. The kiss he'd stolen. Though really it wasn't a steal, because he'd given it, his whole being into her, as selfless and cocky and unrepentant as ever.

-_Are you crying for me Sakura-chan?—_

Her eyes leaked, silent and fast and hot and she knew she would never try and stop them.

_Yes._

_-Your eyes are beautiful.—_

She breathed into his quiet, still mouth. She lay over the dead blonde jinchuriki on a sea of red, in a crater crumbling with dust and stains, under a disgustingly cleared and bright blue sky that she knew mimicked his eyes shade.

Precisely.

Her drowning dark eyes, crests of black pain on a deep sea, blinked.

-_like a whirlpool.—_

Sakura knew her eyes would never be green again.

_fin_

A/N: *Sniff*

So I might have overdone the drama. Bah. I like it anyway, though now I see it could be way better. Oh well.

*Wobbly sob* I'm going to have to go be sentimental for a while now. Thanks for reading!


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